Even when the U.S. and various
European governments finally saw the wisdom of amending this policy and began
funding extensive programs dealing with transition planning and coalition
building, and lent support to Civil Society Organizations all over the country,
little was done by way of military support. The administration even prevented
its allies in the region, including Saudi, Qatar and Turkey from supplying any
advanced weaponry to the rebels. Meanwhile, realities on the ground kept on
changing and civil society activists and moderate rebels were left at the mercy
of regime bombardments and air strikes, which targeted every community where
local councils were able to provide effective local governance.

By late 2012 and early 2013, the
rebels had to deal with all types of extremist Islamist groups, including
Al-Nusra Front, Daesh, Ahrar Al-Sham and Jaish Al-Islam. At first, these groups
sent their own elements to take part in some of the U.S. training programs
under the pretense of being moderates. Once there, they used their
participation to collect information on other activists and real moderate rebels
whom they would later target upon their return to Syria. Representatives of the
State Department taking part in selecting people for the training were
repeatedly warned about such infiltrations and its dangers, but they ignored
all warnings.

Vetting was never going to be an
easy process, especially when you have a late start at it, then, you choose to
do it haphazardly, in fits and struts, and keep refusing to offer advanced
weaponry or at least aerial support, and keep changing your objective, thus,
demonstrating a certain unreliability and untrustworthiness, while extremist
groups offer continuous reliable support. Add bureaucratic mismanagement to the
mix, and of course you can expect fuckups.

Be that at it may, The real
bottom line is: despite all the problems of the Syrian activists and opposition
members, including their fractiousness and their amateurishness, they did,
nonetheless and with the support of variety of American and European
organizations, and some of the more experienced elements in their midst, do
their due diligence on transition planning and day-after visions. But they were
faced with an administration that was adamant about doing nothing: that saw any
intervention in Syria, or anywhere else for that matter, to be unwarranted even
when the protests were nonviolent and the regime was clearly committed to the
use of overwhelming force, that is, even when the protesters clearly had the
higher moral ground, and there were so few extremists. Neither the overwhelming
evidence of systematic slaughter and ethnic cleansing by the regime, nor use of
chemical weapons, changed the President’s calculus. When finally the
administration chose to intervene in the situation, it did so in response to
the rise of IS in Iraq and Syria, and it chose to confront it in Iraq first
then in Syria, and always with a lot of caveats: no boots on the ground (later
amended to only the fewest possible boots on the ground), no advanced weapons
to rebels in Syria (but plenty to the Shia-dominated Iraqi army, which was also
arming Shia militias fighting rebels in Syria), no no-fly zone over Syria (thus
no cover to rebels fighting against anyone), and a slow-pace training
program for moderate rebels that was
even more catastrophically mismanaged than the earlier training programs (and
we cannot blame neither activists nor rebels here, since the management was
always in the hands of American and European brokers). In fact, the entire
training program with its half a billion dollar price tag seems to have been
designed to enable the administration to claim that something was being done,
when the administration had no intention of doing anything at all, yet.

Moreover, the administration
never admitted to any miscalculations in connection to the Syria conflict, be
it the persistence of the regime and its head, the rise of IS, the dwindling
numbers of moderate rebels, or the fact that Syria seems to have been
transformed into a failed state parts of which now are practically run by
Iranian and Russian military advisers.

The real bottom line of the
bottom line is: we have been dealing with an administration that doesn’t even
see in the rise of Daesh a major threat, and is, therefore, willing to adopt a
very slow-response strategy to combating it.

Go ahead, patronize me!

About Ammar

Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian-American author and pro-democracy activist based in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.

The Delirica

The Delirica is a companion blog to the Daily Digest of Global Delirium meant to highlight certain DDGD items by publishing them as separate posts. Also, the Delirica republishes articles by Ammar that appeared on other sites since 2016. Older articles can be found on Ammar's internet archive: Ammar.World